Highland Cove Sanatorium sits abandoned on a desolate island one mile off the Scottish mainland. It’s a dark, foreboding place, filled with nightmares. Even darker are the asylum’s secrets: a history of disease and mental illness, macabre experiments and murder.
The tales of ghostly appearances are said to be more fact than fiction, but no one has ever documented the phenomenon. Codie Jackson aims to change all that. Arriving from London with his small independent film crew, they plan to make a documentary that will forever change their lives.
But when one of the crew disappears, things begin to spiral out of control. A storm closes in to ravage the island, and in the darkness Highland Cove’s true horrors are revealed. Now lost within the institution’s labyrinthine corridors, Codie and his team realize that their nightmare is only just beginning.
Title: Highland Cove | Author: Dylan J. Morgan | Publisher: DJM Entertainment | Pub. Date: 2020-March-30 | ASIN: B085XKMSBF | Genre: Horror | Language: English | Source: Author | Unstarred Review | Content warnings below review.
Highland Cove Review
Highland Cove will please readers looking for a good ‘haunted asylum’ story, provided they haven’t read a lot of them. Dylan J. Morgan writes a very solid, by the numbers story and there are some fantastic snatches of imagery contained with in it that will make your breath catch and maybe send a prickle down your spine.
The problem comes in that while this had all the markers of a great read, that does not necessarily mean this was a great book. There’s a saying that there is nothing new in fiction, and that is mostly true, and so it is up to the authors to craft a story that feels fresh while using material recycled hundreds of times in the creative world. That is where Highland Cove fails.
This is a very competently told story, but it is not an exciting nor fear-inducing one.
However, besides the imagery (and the stuff at the end is SO good!!), there are other good things to talk about. Like the fact that Morgan puts two of the characters in a loving relationship without falling into the usual tropes of one cheating on the other or any of that shite. He included a LGBTQ character, but didn’t play into any of the ridiculous stereotypes around them. Morgan also adeptly handled having a cast of five without losing the thread with any of them.
Although for this reader it wasn’t an amazing read, Highland Cove is still worth checking out. It might scare the bejesus out of you.
Check out Highland Cove on Storygraph.
Lilyn G is the founder of Sci-Fi & Scary, and leader of the Coolthulhu Crew. She does book and film reviews for both genres the site focuses on. Her tastes run towards creature features, hard science fiction, and lots and lots of action. She also has a soft spot for middle-grade fiction that rears its head frequently.
Though no longer involved with Ladies of Horror Fiction due to other responsibilities and a too-full plate, she was one of the original 4 co-founders.
Feel free to chat her up on Twitter as long as you aren’t hitting her up to review your book.
Be First to Comment